It was the 1st of November. Worldwide, we set alarms, 10 am EST time, 5 pm GMT. I was one of them. I had Beauty Bay up on my phone and laptop all day. Ready. Waiting. This was it. Shane and Jeffree were releasing their joint collection today. Then, it turned into four hours of pure stress.
The launch day was building up the hype, the rest of the world waiting for the US to start their mornings. I refreshed the Beauty Bay website a lot during this time. Even though I knew that it was futile until 5, I thought I just might as well. But then, just before five the Beauty Bay website crashes. Cue the frantic refreshing. The admins of the site had somehow not anticipated the sheer traffic they would be receiving for this – a global release of a product with a build-up documentary has been receiving millions of views. Yet it wasn’t just this website that had gone down.
Worldwide, cosmetic sites were crashing. So, in this, for lack of a better word, stampede, for the Precious, I opened up more tabs and hopped from the Jeffree Star site to the Morphe site. Where, at only five minutes past 5, the entirety of the leading stock had sold out. Oh no. Obi Wan Keno-Bay
was now my only hope. During this time, three hours to be exact, of waiting, refreshing, sighing and waiting again, I was able to nearly buy the products about six times until the website crashed again. All the while, I was getting ready for a social, using Jeffree highlighters and liquid lipsticks. At this point, the problem with the site wasn’t necessarily traffic. The place can handle said traffic. However, due to its excessive capacity for people, the site began to falter. The website started charging people for products that they wouldn’t receive, or (in my case) allowing individuals to pop sold out items in their baskets.
I discovered this as the time ticked further and further away from 5 pm and first, the Shane Glossin’ lip gloss had to leave my basket because it was sold out – massive oversight when they discussed ordering the units in the documentary. As though the quantity was huge for everything, this particular gloss was going to be the most popular product by far, purely because of its universal appeal to a broad audience. Then the Mini-Controversy palette sold out, and things weren’t looking good for me. However, lo and behold at 20 past 8, I was finally able to purchase the Conspiracy palette, the holy grail while nursing a double gin and lemonade. Relief washed over me like a beautiful, clear waterfall in a lush, undiscovered rainforest.
I finally got my hands on the product six days later – receiving no confirmation email or dispatch information. The only confirmation was on the app, which I switched to after a mild epiphany. (I realised it would probably cut-through traffic as the Vue app did upon buying Endgame tickets.) In that waiting time, BeautyBay released a ‘statement’ on their twitter addressing the experience everyone had and a blanket apology for that and the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t receive the products. I have to say that I wouldn’t hold Beauty Bay responsible for people this experience as a whole, as it’s the kind of event that doesn’t warrant blame, mainly because people have received their products. Some people claim that they have been charged without ever receiving the product. However, Beauty Bay is yet to comment or substantiate these claims.
That said, was it worth it?
Well, based on the quality of the Conspiracy palette alone, I’d have to say yes. Unlike the Jaqueline Hill or Kylie Cosmetics releases of the world, the product has delivered on what it promised us in the series. The swatches of each colour were beautiful, pigmented and lightweight. On top of this, there were also incredibly easy to remove and didn’t stain my skin at all. The consistency of the colours is strangely so satiny that they nearly felt creamy and they are yet to be patchy.
The packaging is just beautiful. The palette itself came in a cardboard sleeve with a hypnotic white and black design on it and ‘Conspiracy’ bevelled on top. Sliding this off, the palette itself by weight alone felt as much as it’s worth. Retailing at £48, this is already an excellent deal considering similar palettes such as Huda Beauty’s Mercury Retrograde palette retails at £58, and I can’t even compare the difference in standards of presentation.
Complete with Jeffree’s signature latch locks that make the palette instantly feel like pirate’s treasure or something equally as fought-after, the palette has a raised pyramidic look to it, finished off with the triangle logo for Shane’s products. The font is very cleverly remnant of the Twilight Zone, and something I particularly like and didn’t notice straight away is how they subtly embed Jeffree’s stamp in Shane’s logo in pink.
Upon opening the palette, there’s a shiny new mirror, and of course the colours themselves. In the collection reveal video, Jeffree explained that they separated the colours into themes so that the top is the daytime, most-used neutrals and bases. The middle layer is the raving, nightlife (or even daytime, you do you) brights, and the bottom layer is the dark, holiday metallics, which did help explain the colour choices a lot. The colours are very blendable and smooth upon application, and it’s a brilliant palette for a collection that could’ve easily fallen into the realms of a gimmick.
Despite the issues on the day of release, this product has been a fantastic venture and an enormous pay off for Jeffree and Shane. Now that the release is over, they are drowning in profit. I’m left with the ‘what now’ feeling of someone who’s sports team has just lost. At least I’ll use the palette, and as Jeffree announced that we’d have to wait until 2020 for more product releases, we may have more controversies to come.
